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Sunday, February 3, 2013

Those of you who have read one of my books will know that I
write in the fantasy genre.And, as is
common in that genre, many of the characters have super-funky names like
Gremnederbeer and Fhallix.Ok, not
really.No one has those names, but my
character's names are far from mainstream. Of course, mainstream names are
getting weirder and weirder--but that’s a whole different soapbox.

Anyway, I am finding that it is hard to keep track of the
weird names.Not only do my fingers
screw up and mistype them, but I can’t seem to remember them from page to
page.Was it Germenderbeer or
Gremnederbeer? As a semi-tech-savvy person, I am tempted to add these names to
Word’s dictionary to help my puny human brain out. Yet, that seems perilous.
Will my computer start auto-correcting German beer to Gremnederbeer? I can’t
have that! That’s a whole different kind of beer.

So, I am left wondering what the masters like Tolkien and
George R.R. Martin do. Obviously not Tolkien, since he was writing in the time
of feather pens and scrolls, but Martin and his brethren. I mean, Martin has to
have enough flow charts in his study tracking the characters and whether they’ve
lost their heads to rival the most prolific schizophrenic, so maybe he could just
refer to them. But those of us who don’t want wait five years for his next book
would prefer him not looking up every ten seconds to check the spelling. Seems
like a little tech-assist would be the way to go. So, George R.R. Martin, if
you’re reading my blog, should I add Gremnederbeer to my dictionary?